If I may offer a few observations;

Personally I come at this as someone having spent most of their life working in various horse related occupations.

The first point I'd make is to distinguish fauna from flora, as both are living organisms.

Since we/fauna have to intentionally move around our environment, rather than branch and root out in a particular situation, that starts to explain our physiology. We are fairly self contained units, which creates a bit of bias toward the node over the network, as separate and distinct from context.

Then, in order to navigate, we have this sequential process of perception, primarily focused on sorting and judging actions and environment. To top it off, as humanity, we have managed to develop a reasonably sophisticated system of communicating increasingly abstract concepts, from initial narratives.

One major bias this creates is our notion of time, as this point of the present, moving past to future. Which even physics codifies as measures of duration and correlates with measures of distance.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events form and dissolve.

There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is "conserved," because it manifests this physical state. Its changing configuration creates the passage of time. Not to mention temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes all.

We use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but don't refer to them as the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of perception.

So energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.

With a wave, the energy drives it, while the fluctuations rise and fall, come and go.

In a factory, the product goes start to finish,future to past, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. As lives go birth to death, while live moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Now consider that consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts it manfests come and go, future to past.

Which suggests consciousness/sentience functions as an energy. While it might seem to be a neutral observer, that can be attributed to the fact that as an energy, its only expression is as the forms it manfests. Consider the mind when one is trying to go to sleep and it insists on flashing through its files of things to think about and even when asleep, dreams.

Consider the relationship of a movie to the projector light; The frames go from being in the future to being in the past, as the light moves onto the next frame. So consciousness is like the light, while the frames are the thoughts.

Yet as these biological organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through the information. Which raise the question of whether the brain is the source of this flame within, or more the lenses and filters through which it shines?

To add a thought on free will versus determinism, if the only reality is this physical present, the future cannot be determined, if the input hasn't yet been calculated and that can only occur within the present.

In which consciousness functions as an energy, thus necessarily causal. Though sequence is not necessarily energy exchange. Yesterday doesn't cause today. The sun shining on a spinning planet creates this cycle of days and nights. Our conscious thought process, as flashes of perception, is more like the sequence of days, than the processes creating them.

Thus the need to rationalize some orderly flow out of far more information than we can process.

Free will is an oxymoron, as a will free of cause would be equally free of effect and the entire premise of will is to affect. We are a small part of nature's process of selection.

As Alan Watts put it, the wake doesn't steer the boat, the boat creates the wake.

I could also go into the fact that natural prey animals tend to have eyes toward the sides of their heads and are much more spatially aware, because their primary concern is what might eat them, not what they are eating.

Which goes back into the whole relationship between organisms and ecosystems, nodes and networks, signals and noise, etc.

People are linear and goal oriented, in a cyclical, reciprocal, feedback generated reality and now that we are reaching the edge of the petri dish, it might be time to better understand the thermodynamics driving our reality, not just the narratives and rationalizations we tell each other.